Sundog (Contemporary Classics)

by Jim Harrison

  Suddenly we were on a high bank above the river, and the two-track dead-ended. Strang strapped on his knee pads and literally bailed out, with the dog scrambling after him. What the fuck, I thought, and ran over to the bank, noting the river hundreds of feet below and the bushes waving on the way down to mark Strang's progress. I felt a bit lonely out there in the outback, naked is closer, so I opened a bottle of wine to drive away the road dust. Will the white Bordeaux change the wilderness like the jar in Tennessee? Hopefully. I looked wanly at the extra set of knee pads and knew that, in that I am an incompetent liar and Eulia would ask, I'd have to crawl a few feet. I had negligently taken all the snacks out of my cooler, so I would go lunchless. Abruptly I felt caught in the locus Strang had just described: I didn't know where I was, pure and simple. I restored the Bordeaux to my Igloo cooler and pulled on the knee pads. How can you feel foolish when only the sky is watching, or do trees develop eyes, as in children's stories? I walked into a gentle-looking thicket and lowered myself to the ground, suppressing an urge to giggle. I was happy my critics couldn't see me, or my ex-wives, my mother, whomever. I made my way through the thicket, rather laboriously trying to figure out a gait—should I be a trotter, pacer, thoroughbred, or dog? I heard something in the bushes ahead, or thought I did. I stood and walked back to the car with back and butt muscles knotted, as if I were to be attacked and didn't want to know by what. I scraped the pine needles off my palms and went for the wine and my tape machine.

  * * *

  TAPE 5: Edward Curtis owned an etching of a lone coyote, the actual beast, paddling a war canoe upriver with an almost imperceptible trace of a smile. You have to study the smile to see it. What I am saying is, far out in this pine barren Strang might not quite be what I thought he was: an alpha type, a technological genius, at home in any country, the sort that does the core of the world's business, hard-driving, reality-oriented, etc. Writers by experience are over-trained in cynicism, and cynicism along with irony is a device, a set of blinders, to keep the world in its place. Writers pretty much think they are what the total consensus of opinion says they are. It's difficult to avoid this unless they own an additional, secret life, but then their mission is to tell secrets, not conceal them. There is no real consensus about the Strangs of the world because there aren't many of them, they work in inaccessible and unpleasant places far off the usual world capital junket, and those like myself gifted with words (hopefully) are ignorant of their language. My teeth ache at the thought that I'll actually have to read those technical books he gave me.

  I am reminded again that once you get truly out of the circle of your acquaintances, and away from those who bear your professional likeness, you perceive again the mystery of personality. Strang pointed out jokingly at lunch the other day that even the animal world rarely departs from rigidly prescribed habits of feeding and range. Birds migrate to the same place. There are about three hundred Kirtland warblers left on earth, all in three counties in northern Michigan. They join each other for winter on the same tiny island in the Bahamas. So says Mother. Of course, radical changes in climate, food availability, the presence of man, can divert the pattern.

  Who is this daughter, or stepdaughter, Eulia? She bears no resemblance to Strang, so she must be a stepdaughter. I'm trying to figure out an acceptable way to visit brother Karl in prison, and maybe at least one of the sisters for a full profile. It would take a boggling courtship dance to get close to Eulia. I don't like to see her underthings on the clothesline, reminding me as they do of my steady march into middle age, and my equally declining, perhaps prematurely, supply of hormones.

  It's four o'clock, and Strang has been gone for three hours. I have become morose from lack of food and open another bottle of wine, this one a red. What would it be like to have Eulia fall in love with you? Or someone similar. It doesn't happen to the testy observer; ugly words, senescence and deliquescence, arise. She'd hump your chin when you're tired like little Egypt, Little Cartagena, moist-limbed . . . .

  I abruptly put on Beethoven's “Four Quartets,” which can be heard in the background should my career arouse enough interest to attract graduate students. The music is the equivalent of a ten-milligram Valium or a mother's lullaby to a three-year-old. I am trying to reduce Strang's notions of the sensuosities of time to a lucid idea. This music is as good as music gets, except up there in the galactic swirl. Life is not segmented artificially by what we call days, months, years, dawns, noons, evenings, night; rather, life is segmented by our moods, impressions, traumas, odd transferences of power from inanimate objects—the aesthetic principle—dreams, linked by time spans of loves and hates and indifference, unexpected changes in the prism of our understanding, areas of passion or lust that disappear in a moment, lapsing into a kind of sloth, dread and slowness . . . .

  It was no use. I got out of the car and looked down into the gorge. I saw the back of a hawk flying upstream below me. There was the vertigo of a new mood I didn't understand, caused, no doubt, by absolute isolation. I wanted to call out to Strang but couldn't. I opened all the windows of the vehicle and cranked up a Vivaldi tape as far as it would go, then walked down the road to listen. Out there in that vast scrub, a quarter of a mile was about perfect. I would surely go insane if I couldn't orchestrate what was happening to me.

  * * *

  Back at the cabin, we had one of the premier dinners of my life, right up there in the top ten. And this despite my having eaten in dozens of the best restaurants in the world. Part of the reason was an irrational hunger occurring in a man who never allows himself to be mildly hungry. The only title I ever really admired or envied was Curnonsky, Prince of Gourmands. The meal explained the odd assortment Marshall had sent. It turns out that many of the cooks at construction camps come from Louisiana. Eulia had made Strang's favorite dish: a simple gumbo made from dark roux, a duck stock where the meat is reserved for the final dish, garlic, hot peppers, a mirepoix, a little okra, andouille sausage, then within ten minutes of completion you add the shrimp, oysters and crabmeat. Carumba!

  “You mustn't eat so much,” she said, denying me a third bowl.

  “What the fuck?” I gulped. I'm only twelve years old when it comes to my compulsions.

  “But he crawled all afternoon.” Strang came to my defense.

  “No, he didn't. His knee pads were barely soiled. I guess seventy-seven feet. The doctors came out just before you came home.” She turned to me. “If I give you a third bowl, will you take me on an adventure tomorrow? Robert doesn't like me around when the doctors are here, because he wants to be able to lie to suit his purpose.”

  “Of course,” Strang said, “I'm the director, and I make everything up as I go along. I can tell you what's already happened, but I'd like to control my future.” Strang ladled out my third bowl, his glance acknowledging that I'd sacrifice a finger to the hatchet to take Eulia on an “adventure.” I merely toyed with my third bowl under the watchful and teasing eye of Eulia; then, in an act of macho defiance, I ate the sucker.

  The day with Eulia was radically different from what I expected. First of all, it was raining in the morning when I picked her up. I waited outside because the doctors’ rental car was already there. She ran out with a hamper in one of those sportif outfits preferred by foreign girls with dough. We drove in silence all the way to town, and I began to develop a lump in my stomach that quivered to the rhythm of the windshield wipers. I was deep into a Latin problem and recalled that a lady from Rio had ruined my agent's life for an entire year.

  “This fucking, dirty rain. I want to go dancing. Maybe the sun will shine later. Where can we dance?” She was cloudy and petulant.

  I pulled up in front of the bar. It was midmorning, and a group of retired loggers and commercial fishermen would be having their coffee hour.

  “She wants to dance,” I said to my friend, the owner. “She also wants a rum and Coke. If she's going to drink, so am I. Will they mind?” I eyed the old geezers, who in turn were staring at Eul
ia.

  “Your money's as good as theirs. They'll have a new story to repeat a hundred times.”

  She danced for about two hours, pausing only to gulp at a succession of rum and Cokes. It was somewhat of a party: When I became exhausted, a commercial fisherman in his sixties took over, then the bar owner himself. The coffee cups were shoved aside, and I bought a number of inexpensive rounds. The music was severely limited, but Eulia was satisfied with a Beach Boys medley played over and over. I got her out of there at noon when we were both quite drunk, she more than I, on the pretext that the sun was shining. We drove out toward a creek I had selected for a picnic. As usual, I had to get something in my stomach. She decided to talk and laugh entirely in Spanish, and I decided not to protest. The bar owner had made her an enormous drink to go, which she swallowed greedily.

  When we got to the creek, the sun was shining warmly and a breeze was blowing. I laid out the picnic on a blanket and decided we scarcely needed a bottle of wine. Without the breeze, the mosquitoes and blackflies would have murdered us; I sensed them lurking back in the swamp at the edge of the small clearing like pilots waiting for a decrease in headwind. There was a fatigued sense that, though I was twice her age, not to speak of twice her size, I was not in control of the situation. I almost yearned for a return to the Latin formalities that had marked the first three weeks of knowing each other.

  I looked up to see Eulia leaning naked against an aspen on the edge of the creek, then she made a lurching, wobbly jump, her first ungraceful move in my presence. Her screams were shattering, and I ran over to help her out of the creek.

  “Oh madre de mio, oh shit, oh my god, oh I am dying, you bastard, you eveil son of a bitch.”

  The last patches of snow in the woods had only been melted for a few weeks, and the creek water couldn't be much over forty, the temperature of very cold beer. Her face was contorted and bluish, nearly ugly, and she embraced herself as if to crush her ribs. Naturally, I laughed. If she had had a knife or gun in hand I would have been a goner. Instead she gave me a brutal shove in the gut that took my wind away, a vengeful, nonplayful, double-fisted slug and shove that toppled me backward into the creek. I could have broken my neck or had a heart attack from the icy water. My cavalry twill wool trousers were probably ruined, not to speak of my Cordovan boots. For some reason, I scrambled out on the far side of the creek, which meant I would have to cross it again.

  “You shithead, you greaser cunt!” I yelled. I watched her up-end the picnic, wrap herself in the blanket and curl up on the ground. I leaned against a tree until I could catch my breath, then looked for a shallower place to recross the creek. I took off my clothes and stretched them on the warm car hood to dry. She was facing away from me and weeping. Taken to its extreme, alcohol is an utter cliché, especially if the soul is troubled before the first drink. The progression is inevitable: relief, ecstasy, despair, depression, the possibility of violence.

  My anger relented, and I knelt beside her and put my hand on her forehead as she shook with sobs. She held out her arms to me and I joined her in the blanket, which wasn't quite large enough. I embraced her and heard a litany of real griefs: She knew her father would die, and she loved him so much, she would be an orphan “again,” a word that puzzled me. Her weeping subsided against my tear-wet breasts.

  “You are like a big, warm mamá,” she whispered. A hand clutched at my still cool, shrunken member, which began to grow. “Let's not swim here anymore.”

  My feelings were deeply hurt from being called a mamá but she began snoring against my chest before I could protest. Though the blanket was covering me, my body was pressed against the grass and a number of uncomfortable sticks. Frankly, I didn't want to move and dislodge her hand, which was wrapped firmly and pleasurably around my prick. For want of anything else to do, I stared up into the blue sky and whispered hello to a scudding cloud. I suppressed a voyeur's urge to take a good look at her body for the same reason. A bird in hand, as they say. Dear Eulia, I'm not going to fall in love with you. I just found some work to do, and I don't want to ruin my life. I dozed.

  “My head! I must have aspirin.” She shook me.

  I dragged myself up and got aspirin from the glove compartment and water from the cooler. I knelt down and fed her some, taking two myself. The breeze had subsided, and the bugs were on the attack. She reached out and playfully waggled my hard-on.

  “Did you make love to me?”

  “Of course not. I'd never fuck a woman who had passed out,” I said, with the air of the gentleman from the British Isles speaking to the United Nations Assembly.

  “You are a gentleman. Any man in Costa Rica would have raped me, and I wouldn't have known it. You are so romantic.”

  “What's wrong with now?” I was beginning to feel snippy, betrayed by my virtue.

  She pulled herself up on her elbows, the blanket cast aside and her face a tenuous millimeter from my prick. She studied it as if it were an artifact she had just dug up from an archaeological site. She dropped her open mouth on it like a safe falling from a cornice, but just for one stroke. Then she jumped up, drew on her underpants and rummaged through the containers of food on the grass.

  “Not now. My head aches terribly, and I'm starved.”

  I groaned and lay back. It was somehow worse now, the way she squatted with her beautiful ass, and broke open stone-crab claws, dipping them in a mayonnaise mixture and sucking on the shells.

  “Oh, you poor, big baby.” She dipped her hand in the sauce and grabbed my prick, pumping at it vigorously until I let go with a heartfelt scream. She wiped off her hand with a napkin and continued eating with energy. There was a blissful sting to the mustard in the sauce.

  “We're just like your Indians, correct? We are out in the wilderness eating and having sex. We danced and drank. We had a wonderful day!” She did a marvelous little movie version of an Indian dance, similar to what Debra Paget used to do for Jeff Chandler.

  CHAPTER X

  * * *

  The new order of the day was swimming, not crawling. Strang was in amazingly good spirits for having spent the previous day being probed by two doctors. I wondered idly what it had cost Marshall to send an orthopedic surgeon and a neurologist this far, but Marshall's life was marked by precise and appropriate gestures. I had heard that Marshall had been offered seven million to syndicate the second racehorse he ever bought. He declined the offer, despite the fact that even the wealthiest horsebreeders syndicated in order to spread the risk. A trainer at Hialeah told me that Marshall was pocketing three million bucks in stud fees per year. Oh, well. To those that have, much is given, someone said long ago, a ghastly conundrum.

  “But how are you going to swim? We tried it yesterday, and it was insufferable.”

  “So did I. I'll have to grease up until they send a wet suit. The cold kills the pain a little. The orthopede said I'd crawled way too much and built up big bunches of compensatory muscles around the injuries, which is fine if I want to crawl the rest of my life. If I get to walk, it will make me walk like a goddamned land crab.”

  He thought this was all quite funny.

  * * *

  “Is there a new prognosis?”

  Oh, none at all. They have no real idea what my chances are. The Swiss chemists haven't had any luck determining the long-range effects of the herb. A company doctor talked to a botanist at Harvard, and the man was encouraging to the extent that he said if you're going to die or become completely paralyzed it happens within a day or so. The intermittent mental effects are totally unpredictable. Right now, they seem limited to my dreams, which aren't conducive to rest. In my sleep I'm a baby nursing at my sister Violet's breast, but she looks too young to have had a baby. To be frank, they are gorgeous breasts, which is a little awkward because she's supposed to be my sister. Then that dream slides into a hiding place I had about a quarter of a mile from the house. It was a small, high place in the middle of a swale, a thicket of aspen and elder. I'd go there and sit on this
stump when I was frightened or saddened or just wanted to get away from the family. There's no privacy in a big family. In a hole in the stump, in a metal box designed to hold fish lures, I kept my New Testament and pictures of the actresses Jeanne Crain, Deanna Durbin, and Rita Hayworth I had cut out of Life magazine. Also the shinbone of a crow, which Karl insisted had magical properties. You could make a low, scary whistle through it, which supposedly summoned spirits, though I never saw any. One day in October, the October following Karl's departure for the war, I was sitting on this stump, quite disturbed from having caught my sister Lily and her fisherman making love. I don't mean I was offended. I felt I knew everything from Karl's stories, but this was the first time, other than farm animals, I had seen the act taking place. The noises certainly made it sound like they were having the best time possible, say somewheres between a revival and a basketball game. I never went to a game, but one night outside the gym I hid in the bushes and listened to the cheers. Anyway, I was sitting in my hiding place perfectly still one late afternoon in October when a flight of migrating woodcocks landed all around me. First I heard the fluffing of wings and there they were, at least twenty of them. I didn't bat an eyelash, and my only thought was, wait until I tell Karl about this. They spread out to feed with their long beaks, and most of them flushed when I got up to leave at dark. It was indescribably lovely. The trouble is that when this reoccurs in the dream, the birds are all shot up with a wing or head or leg blown off as if at the end of the hunt, but they're no longer dead. Then I wake up.